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Thursday, March 23, 2017

NO DEAL TONIGHT ON REPEAL OF OBAMACARE

The man who bragged about how great he is at negotiating and making good deals FAILED at his first pass on the anniversary of the passage of the ACA (Obamacare) to repeal it.Republicans hold majorities in both the House and the Senate, but the House was in no mood to give Trump a victory today.

8 comments:

I never thought this vote would actually happen. The Republicans are in an impossible position. Some are getting nervous about how their constituents will vote next year after having their coverage taken away, and want the thing made less cruel, while the grotesquely-misnamed "freedom" caucus won't vote for it because it's not cruel enough. Even the promise of taking away even more basic protections wasn't enough to sway them (what were they holding out for -- a provision that every poor person has to have their face spat in as their insurance is taken away?), and the whole party has spent years cultivating the kind of ideological rigidity that makes compromise impossible, even with each other. I don't think they'll have any more success later on, even if continued failure means the ultimate abomination of letting those 24 million people keep their health insurance.

Crooks and Liars had an interesting post about this today, arguing that the Republicans will end up just quietly dropping the whole subject and backing away from it because it's their least-bad option. And Obama will have the last laugh.

Infidel753, another possibility is that Trump will walk away from another vote if he's told it can't pass. Trump never stood for anything so that won't be difficult for him even if his hollow, vapid promises of health care for everyone and affordable for everyone are shown to be another one of his nothing burgers. He never meant them either.

Trump has no values and stands for nothing. I don't think it will bother him one bit to walk away from "repeal and replace." A man as shallow and fake as he is has no conscience and won't care about broken promises. He'll just blame Obama for his own failure.

After 70 years spent largely skating free of consequences for his puerile misbehaviors and diarrheal mouth, he likely found it something of a shock. Seven decades is a long time, after all, and if the so-called president has learned nothing else in those years, he has learned this: Accountability is for other people.

Received a bill? Stiff the vendor.

Get caught in a lie? Tell another.

Say something stupid? Blame somebody else.

To watch him over the 21 months of his political career has been to suffer a kind of nauseous awe as he repeatedly brazened and bluffed his way through scandals, lies and acts of bungling incompetence that would have sunk … well, anybody normal. You had to wonder if the chickens had forgotten how to come home to roost. You had to wonder if gravity still works.

But accountability arrived this week in an extraordinary open session of the House Intelligence Committee. There, FBI Director James Comey laid waste to Trump’s contention that he was “wire tapped” by then-President Barack Obama during last year’s campaign.

That, however, was just the hors d’oeuvre. The main course was Comey’s confirmation of media reports about an FBI investigation. Yes, he said, the FBI is looking into whether Trump’s people colluded with Russia as that country was meddling in last year’s election with the express aim of electing Trump. The probe could dog the White House for many months.

Cornered, Trump and his apologists tried familiar dodges. They cried, “Fake news!” They misrepresented Comey’s words. They tried to change the subject. Surrogate Jeffrey Lord even insisted the problem is that Trump has been “misinterpreted.”

It all felt even more threadbare than usual. It was hard not to imagine Trump drenched in the flop sweat of a birthday party magician who just realized he left the rabbit in his other top hat.

Small wonder. The tactics that have always served him will not work here. You can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time. But good luck fooling the feds any of the time.

Heaven only knows where this will end up. Maybe the campaign will be exonerated. Maybe we’ll discover the Russian meddling was plotted by Trump and Vladimir Putin over drinks in a hot tub at Mar-a-Lago.

Either way, there is something to be said for the simple fact that the investigation is under way, that Trump and his team will finally be forced to answer serious questions from serious people who will not be impressed by alternative facts and brazen deflections. It’s the kind of knowledge that renews your faith in the system. And in karma.

Turns out the chickens know their way after all, and gravity still works just fine. Accountability has arrived. She’s seven decades late, so she and Donald Trump have a lot of catching up to do.

The chairman of the House intelligence committee has backed down from his dramatic assertion that Donald Trump and his aides were "monitored," by U.S. spies — a claim the Republicans have cited this week in fundraising emails.

Rep. Devin Nunes told reporters Friday he can't be sure whether conversations among Trump or his aides were captured in the surveillance that has become a source of controversy since Nunes made it public in two news conferences this week.

"He said he'll have to get all the documents he requested from the (intelligence community) about this before he knows for sure," his spokesman, Jack Langer, said earlier.

They will pass a healthcare bill but it will be similar to obamacare without some of the penalties like sign up or we fine you. Getting rid of maternity care for males is a good scratch.The republicans know obamacare was disastrous to the democrats and started off with lies which were proven true after it passed. Keep your doctor/insurance company, lower insurance costs by $2500 when the premium costs rose $3500. 30 million are eligible yet on 14 million are covered part due to the cost and the huge deductible. The dems want to get out from under obamacare because they know it has cost them seats as well as the presidency.If there is a good side to what the repubs are doing is they are debating the bill after they see it. That is a lot different than if you want to see it you need to pass it from the blind mice party.